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Comment by hp6 | Hacker News Reader

For a lot of people pro Palestine views are toxic for a lot of other pro Israel is. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

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I filter both, plus any other political talk. I want to look at retro games, some tech and art and that's it. For some people everything has to be political, and anyone who doesn't want to read the angry rants is an an echo chamber, but so be it. Personally, I find my cake to be very tasty.

It's possible to block both. If bsky would let you use starter packs as block lists, it would be a lot easier than it is.

I block any account that is primarily politics-based (Hillary Clinton's social media team joined a month ago and has 5k blocks already so I'm not alone), and other accounts as and when they become tiresome (ie when they go on a political rant). My feeling is that academics broke mostly to bluesky while techies broke mostly to mastodon. I follow some academic accounts that occasionally post interesting things - nothing earth-shattering, but worth checking in once every couple of days.

My main problem with bsky is that a lot of academics seem to approach it as a write-only medium. No engagement.

I mean yea you can call anything hate if you squint hard enough. Reasonable terms of service are never going to satisfy everyone. You can definitely have your cake and eat it too so long as you don't try and please everyone.

the problem is both sides are so caught up in their own identity politics that they can't see the other's perspective. the same goes for right-wing and left-wing in America.

The bigger problem is that people from societies with FPTP voting systems often tend to think binary. The world is more multi-faceted than that, it's not always two sides to a coin, good vs bad, left vs. right, etc.

Agreed! 400 million peoples interests cant be represented by TWO people.

yea, I much like the approach of "be polite" instead of "don't be toxic", which unfortunately is less and less practiced by both sides.

This! It is important to be polite in the face of genocide.

Almost no one is pro genocide, so why is it happening when most countries are more or less democracies? One theory is that the media and politician change the narrative whichever way it suits them. And imo one way to combat this is with polite measured conversations. As the alternative is easily distorted by the opposite side.

I'm not sure what "perspective" has to do with asymmetric warfare unless the perspective is that of how many bombs are being dropped on you.

come on now.

this war has been going on for 3/4 of a century now.

both sides have aggrieved the other and it's a quagmire that most likely will never end.

to have a strong stance NOW means you might be influenced by the news a lot more than you realize.

If the idea that seeing what the effects of the weapons sales and military operations done in your name by your representatives might be too much influence on me, a voter, then I give up. There's just no reasoning with other americans about anything. Have your country.

There are certain keywords people use that are instant red flags. They usually mean I can immediately ignore everything they've written. "Common sense" has become a big one. It's code for "my feelings trump your facts" (pun intended).

But another one is "both sides". There are a number of reasons people fall back to this. Usually it's intellectual laziness, not wanting to know any of the details, usually because it's an issue that the person saying it doesn't actually care about the issue. Some people derive validation from somehow being "above the fray" on some partisan issue.

Another reason is simply not caring about the issue and trying to create a moral equivalence is intentionally or unintentionally used to silence a particular topic.

Not everything is some disagreement between equivalent positions. Sometimes, a given position is just plain wrong. Slavery, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. These are issues historically that have a right side and a wrong side.

On Gaza, there is the side that wants to live, not be bombed and not exist in an apartheid state and there's the side that wants to ethnically cleanse millions of people to create lebensraum. Merely going to Israel has been a radicalizing experience for a lot of people because they instantly recognize what's going on. There are countless examples of this now. I'll choose just one as an example: Sde Temain [1].

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/8/13/israeli...

To argue that extreme Islam and Hamas are just innocent bystanders being put upon by Israel is such a disingenuous take.

This is a war thats been going on for 3/4 of a century with both sides attacking the other and doing horrible things to each other.

You'll be right at home on BlueSky.

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